The Element of Surprise

Limelight - Part 2

Estella POV

Despite not liking Agent Morris one bit, I'm thrilled that we have a case the moment my team enters the police station. Hotch leads them through the bullpen towards Rossi and me and the moment he sees me, he actually smiles. One of those rare Hotch smiles.

"Did someone miss me?" I wink at him.

"I suspend you for a week only to send you away the moment you get back," Aaron shakes his head with a lighthearted chuckle, "What do you think?"

"He cried behind his office doors when you left yesterday," Emily adds to mess with him.

"And he contemplated whether to call you or not every five minutes," JJ joins in the fun.

The look Hotch shoots them is the final straw and the three of us crack up laughing.

"Alright, back to work," Aaron sighs, "Dave, lead the way."

We enter the same room Rossi and I occupied yesterday. The evidence boxes are right where I left them and, surprise, surprise, Morris is there too. I zone out while she introduces herself to my team before showing them the contents of the boxes. Each profiler grabs one to sift through - I notice Spencer looking especially interested in the unsub's wording and the way he objectifies his victims in his written words.

"Is this everything from the unit?" Hotch asks Morris after we had a chance to scan through the evidence.

"No. We pulled the salient materials and had Philly PD process the rest of the items on site."

"What else was there?" Emily inquires.

Morris shrugs, "Just some books, albums, toys."

"Toys?" Derek echoes.

"Yeah, old stuff like from his childhood. We were able to lift some prints but it was a bust. He's not in our system."

That seems to be all the information Hotch needs to give out orders, "Morgan, Prentiss, go back to the unit and see what else it can tell us about the man."

I'm more than satisfied when Morris leaves with them to give them directions. Her absence spurs me on to contribute to the case, "We have to establish if this guy's taking his fantasies to the next level. Trust me, I know about these things he wants to do to women - that's a horrible way to go."

Aaron nods, seeing my point, "We can use these materials to try to identify his signature and connect him to any other open cases."

"On the surface it reads like he wanted to try it all. I think isolating any one aspect might be tough," Spencer points out from what he's gathered in the text on the paper.

'Well, then dig deeper," Hotch mutters, thus appointing this task to the young doctor, "Try linguistics. Look for patterns in the handwriting. Rossi, Estella and I will take the images."

"Find the fetish, find the fiend," the senior agent adds.

With our work cut out for us, I grab the box of magazine to go through the contents from a profiler's point of view this time. At first, I'm not sure what a bunch of articles and sexual pictures can tell me about our unsub, except where he has an unhealthy obsession with bondage and torturing his victims. But after spreading them out on the table before me, I realize something - they're all old and were probably published somewhere between the 80s and 90s.

With that lead, I start going through the publication dates until I managed to arrange them from the earliest edition to the latest, "I think I know when his obsession started." Looking up from their work, Hotch and Rossi approach the desk I'm occupying to see what I found. Showing them the first magazine, I say, "This is the earliest one, published in 1982."